weakest of Dantan's intellectual jokes. Like his brother he also contributed to the great French exhibition of 1855.—R. M.
DANTE, Alighieri, born at Florence in May, 1265, son of Alighiero degli Alighieri and his wife Bella. Dante's ancestors were noble; in the Divina Commedia he speaks of being descended from Cacciaguida, who fell in the crusades, and whose son took his mother's name, Alighieri. Of Dante's youth little is known; and the first fact of importance narrated by all his biographers, is the extraordinary affection he conceived for Beatrice Portinari, when only nine years of age. Beatrice was nearly a year younger when they first met at a festival at the house of her father, and Boccacio says, that "young as Dante was, her image was at once engraved so deeply upon his heart, that from that hour to the end of his life never was it effaced;" and when she died, he "suffered an affliction so profound, and shed so many and such bitter tears, that his friends believed they could end only in death." Except this early love, too many of the facts and dates connected with Dante's life, which have been the subject of volumes of learned discussion, remain, and seem destined to remain, uncertain; the places where he studied, his masters—amongst whom we only know for a certainty Brunetto Latini—his friends, if we except Guido Cavalcanti, Giotto, Casella, the musician (who set many of his canzoni to music, and whom he introduces with much affection in the Commedia); Charles Martel, king of Hungary; Forese, brother to Corso Donate; his sister Piccarda, and perhaps one or two others whom he names in the poem—are involved in obscurity. Boccacio describes him as skilled in painting and music, and expert in all manly exercises. Some years after the death of Beatrice, Dante married Gemma Donati, by whom he had five sons, and one daughter, named Beatrice, who took the veil. Three of his sons died young. Pietro and Jacopo lived to edit their father's great poem and write a commentary upon it. Dante appears to have early taken an active part in public affairs; and we hear of him, when quite young, as having fought against the Ghibellines at Campaldino, and also in the wars against the Pisans. The fame of his studies, and his reputation for prudence and inviolable firmness and honesty, raised him, while yet in the prime of life, to the highest dignities of the republic; in 1300 he was elected one of the priors of Florence. All Italy was at that time divided between the factions of the Guelphs and Ghibellines—the Guelphs the supporters of the priesthood, and the Ghibellines the supporters of the empire. Florence was at the same time distracted by the quarrels of two powerful families, the Donati and the Cerchi, and their adherents. The discord was increased by the arrival in Florence of the chiefs of the Neri and Bianchi, two rival factions of Pistoia, who came to submit their differences to the arbitration of the senate. The Bianchi allied themselves with the Cerchi, the Keri with the Donati. In a secret assembly held by the Neri, it was resolved to entreat the pope, Boniface VIII., to invite Charles de Valois to march against Florence, to put an end to these discords, and reform the state. The step justly irritated the Bianchi; they armed themselves, and hastened to the priors to accuse their adversaries of conspiring against the public liberty. The Neri armed in their turn, the whole town was in agitation, and a conflict was imminent, when the priors, on the advice of Dante, banished the leaders of both the rival factions. But he thus provoked against himself the hatred of both parties, and that of Boniface and the supporters of Charles de Valois, by causing his offered mediation to be refused; for as he himself says—"In politia obliqua bonus homo est malus civis." Boniface, who feared and disliked the Bianchi, now urged Charles to march on Florence. He did so, but only to take possession of the town on his own account. The Neri triumphed, and Dante was the principal object of their vengeance. Accused on the strength of a forged document, and even whilst he was ambassador to Boniface VIII., of extorting money, he was sentenced to make pecuniary reparation, and to two years' banishment. His house was given up to pillage, and his lands devastated. Three months afterwards, he having neither paid the fine, nor sought to justify himself, his enemies condemned him to be burnt to death—"ubique comburatur sic quod moriatur." Then began for Dante "the hell of exile—that slow, bitter, lingering death, which none can know but the exile himself—that consumption of the soul, which has only one hope to console it."
He seems to have several times traversed the whole of Italy, and to have visited Paris. He wandered, unshaken by poverty and suffering, "from province to province, from city to city, from court to court, to see if among the heads of parties, among warriors of renown, he might find a man who could or would save Italy, and he found no one." He says of himself that he was tossed about like a ship without sail or rudder, driven through every port, harbour, and shore, by the bleak wind of grievous poverty. He bore himself proudly under his great adversity, taking refuge in his conscience—"sotto l'usbergo del sentirsi puro;" and when, some time after, he was offered permission to return to the Florence he loved so well, under condition of publicly asking pardon, he refused in a magnificent letter still extant—"Estne ista revocatio gloriosa, qua Dante Alighierius revocatus ad patriam, per trilustrium fere perpessus exilium?" he asks. "Hæcne meruit innocentia manifesta quibuslibet? . . . . Absit a viro philosophiæ domestico temeraria terreni cordis humilitas, ut more cujusdam scioli et aliorum infamium, quasi vinctus, ipse se patiatur offerri! Absit a viro predicante justitiam, ut perpessus injuriam, inferentibus, velut bene-merentibus, pecuniam suam solvat! Non est hæc via redeunti ad patriam, pater mi. . . . Quod si per nullam talem Florentia introitur, nunquam Florentiam introibo," &c. It was during this brave life of trial and distress that he composed the greater part of the "Divina Commedia," which he calls "the sacred poem, to which both heaven and earth have lent a hand." In it the noble pride of his soul is manifested in the disdainful silence he preserves as to his personal enemies, not one of whom (save Boniface VIII. "whom it was necessary to punish in the name of religion and Italy") has he placed in hell. He seems to have applied to them the words spoken by Virgil in the beginning of the poem, of those who have been worthy neither of heaven nor hell. "Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa." Equally strong in love and hatred, it was the love of right, and the hatred of wrong that inspired him—never love of himself, nor hatred of other men. The poem which chronicles the destiny of the human race, chronicles also the poet's own struggles "with the wanderings of his understanding, with the fire of the poet, with the fury of his passions." It chronicles the "purification of heart by which he passed from the hell of struggle to the heaven of victory, 'in violenta e disperata pace'. . . his desire to live in the future, in the second life. . . . The grand thought of a mutual responsibility, joining in one bond the whole human race, was ever and ever before his eyes. The connection between this world and the next, between one period of life and the remainder, is brought forward every moment in the poem. A feeling of tenderness, engendered by this idea, gleams across the Purgatorio, and even finds its way into the Inferno. The spirits even there anxiously ask for tidings of the earth, and desire to send back news of themselves."
The limits of a biographical sketch render impossible an adequate description of a work so gigantic as the "Divina Commedia," which the Abbé Lamennais describes as having been created, to sum up, and be the expression and monument of the whole middle ages, before they passed away into the abyss. "Grand, terrible, and lugubrious is the immense apparition. One feels as if witnessing a mighty funeral, and hearing the service of the dead in a huge cathedral draped in black. Yet, meanwhile, a breath of life, of a life destined to assume a higher and purer development than that which has expired, passes through the aisles, and rises to the vaulted roof of the immense edifice—the quickening of a new life thrills through its mighty womb. The great poem is at once a tomb and a cradle—the splendid tomb of a world passing away, the cradle of a dawning brighter world to come. It is a porch that unites two temples—the temple of the past and the temple of the future. The past has deposited therein its religion, its ideas, its science, as the Egyptians deposited their kings and symbolic gods in the sepulchres of Thebes and Memphis. The future brings to it its aspirations and the germs of its progress, swathed in the newborn language of a splendid poetry. It is a mystic infant that draws its life from the two sources of sacred tradition and profane fiction—Moses and St. Paul, Homer and Virgil. Its glance turned towards Greece and Rome announces Petrarch, Boccacio, and a host to come; its thirst for light and knowledge, its eager search into the mysteries of the universe and its laws and constitution, foretell Galileo. Night still broods over the earth, but the horizon is streaked with the coming dawn."
In one of his wanderings across the mountains of Lunigiana, shortly before his death, Dante knocked at the gate of the monastery of Santa Croce del Corvo. The monk who opened
